Cmdr. Mike Halstead - Officer in the space force and our hero. He has such a problem putting two and two together that you might think the equation required calculus.

Lt. Connie Gomez - Halstead's snippy girlfriend and supposedly the perfect female. I'm assuming they mean from a genetic standpoint, because she seems like a royal _____. (I'll give you some hints: five letters, first letter is a "B," last letter is an "H," and there is one vowel.)

Charles - Apparently a fellow member of the space force and Halstead's friend. Yup, good old Charles.

Jake - Fiercely loyal to Halstead; he is the young rookie constantly being told to "look out."

Dr. Delfos - Scientist who is left a stunted midget after nearly being kidnapped (more on that later).

The Freaks - Monstrous beings with four arms and pupils like a cat. Tasked with carrying out abductions on Earth, they are meant to be inconspicuous. Everyone dresses in bright and flowing clothes, but these goons wear long black trench coats, black caps, and dark sunglasses.

Nurmi - Executive in CBM (a powerful company). If you were told there was one evil person in the room and asked to point him out... ...well, you would start baying like a hound and go after this guy. Drowns in cherry Kool-Aid.

The Plot:

We have started a new millennium, despite doomsayers and computer programmers who only coded two digits for the date field. Where are the flying cars, robot servants, and laser weapons? Although, this movie makes one think the flying car is best left on the drawing board. They careen through the air, seemingly out of control like a newbie piloting his first Spathi ship. Oh well, you cannot win them all.

To establish that "this is the future" we start with some scenes of astronauts working in space. One steps daintily along while another swings drunkenly on a wire, swimming through space (I imagine the same people who controlled the car model were at work here). Inside the space station things are progressing as well. Nurmi is testing a batch of organs while arguing over the ethics of transplants with Cmdr Halstead. Neither make any valid points; they might as well be yelling "yes" or "no" at each other. Following that refreshing discussion the company man takes a tour of the station. He watches Connie teaching close combat skills and immediately starts making the moves on Halstead's girlfriend.

Fraternization between members is either discouraged or outright banned in modern military organizations, for obvious reasons. Nobody minds that Halstead is dating a member of his command? And what in the world is Nurmi thinking? Would you antagonize someone who had complete access to the station's functions? "Oops, it appears that Mr. Nurmi's cabin was depressurized by accident. Have maintenance send over a cleaning crew."

Tragedy is averted when a telegram arrives from Earth. Missing persons reports are being submitted at a frightful rate! Halstead is summoned to help investigate before workers at the census bureau begin tearing out their hair in frustration. The audience already knows what is going on to an extent. Mysterious pairs of men and women are accosting citizens, apparently at random, and doing something to them. The freaks in black envelop the victims in their trench coats and only a pile of clothes is left (that are then picked up by the female).

Dr. Delfos' narrow escape from abduction provides some vital clues. Interrupted while wrapping around his target, the man in black allows a midget version of the doctor to scurry away. Immediately the woman stabs him (the trench coat guy) with a needle. His empty clothes drop to the ground, then she makes good her escape in a nearby car. Hey, check it out, that ride looks just like something out of "The Jetsons," but with wheels.

The authorities are unable to get any answers from Delfos; the scientist promptly fell into a coma. Halstead and his agents set up security cameras and teams to monitor the entire city, then wait for something to happen. Luckily Mike's sister sees some of the kidnappers in time, thwarting their kidnapping her son, and immediately reports what happened. With holograms modeled on her description the investigators finally notice the odd pairs of men and women wandering around. A chase ensues, ending in the crash scene that left me a giggling fool. The wreckage yields a carrying case for dolls and inside are three people, shrunk to just inches in height!

Taken back to the lab and reanimated, the little people are shocked to see Halstead has glued a piece of sheet metal onto his face and insists on them calling him "Breeti."

Just kidding, really. Ow, stop hitting me!

What Halstead and his men do is find their opponent's base of operations. During the struggle (three on three) a woman accidentally stabs herself with one of those strange needles, but the other two are taken prisoner. I've been wondering what is in those needles that makes a human just disappear. Maybe a desiccant that turns the target into nothing more than humidity?

Clues lead the Commander and his men to CBM and Nurmi. Breaking into a research lab proves very illuminating and requires no small use of their "laser pistols" to fend off the freaks and guards who attack. The company has lots of political clout though, promising to deny or delay any course of action. Halstead and a small group of loyal troops stage a surprise raid on the secret company base on Delphus.

Connie is already on Delphus, after accepting Nurmi's offer for a memorable vacation. The base is the center of operations for a sinister plan! CBM wants to create a master race through fusion technology! In the same way that the four-armed freaks were created they have been splicing people together. Now they plan the ultimate marriage of man and woman, combining half of Nurmi with half of Connie. From the looks of it they are going to do this right down the center too. I have a major wake up call for the mad scientists. There are a couple places on the human body requiring a command decision and the groin is just the first that comes to mind.

The invading space force was captured upon arrival, but make a bid for freedom when the final experiment commences. Mass confusion reigns supreme as the fighting spreads, leaving Halstead and Nurmi to face off. The latter knows he is beaten and rants like a megalomaniac before releasing several million gallons of cherry Kool-Aid to flood the facility. At first I thought it was supposed to be highly acidic, because of the way CBM employees react to partial immersion. Later Mike swims through the stuff though, so obviously it is a neutral solution (more or less). All the other characters escape by sealing themselves inside capsules and floating to the surface. Explosions and fireworks accompany the base's submergence, so I'm guessing they had prodigious stores of pure sodium. Usually when things flood they just, well, flood.

A better title might have been "Planet Where the 60's Never Ended," but I am happy they did. Dizzying conveyances, telephones with dial pads on the bottom (now that's annoying), and corporations thumbing their noses at the federal government would be all the rage. Hard to forget the hideous mass of circuits and vacuum tubes that Nurmi praised as the "perfect computer." I wonder what he would have thought upon seeing a Power Mac Cube.

The Cabal is reviewing movies that addressed the future, but it has come and gone:

Halstead and his men just stumbled onto this secret lab. Now they are fighting for their lives against technicians and freaks. Please make sure to aim for the chest emblem Mike or else the movie's insurance claims department is going to get really upset.

On Space Station Gamma One, they're celebrating New Year's Day. Dozens of astronauts form the letters of the words HAPPY NEW YEAR with their bodies -- and one them gets "drunker than a miner on Mars." A lady from one of the other space stations asks Cmdr. Halsted via vidphone when Connie Gomez is going to come over and teach their women karate, while Jake verifies how he recently saw "negative readings" on station radiation meters. Meanwhile at Earth's space headquarters, Halsted's fellow officer Captain DuBois is physically and mentally taken over by strange energy beings called Diafanoids who keep telling his struggling mind: "You WILL do this. You WILL do this. You WILL do this. For the Good of the Whole, you WILL do this." Well, to be brief, DuBois engages in certain sabotage and mutinous activities ("He's gone Galaxy!") as various space stations are suddenly attacked by the Diafanoids ("billions of lights traveling at fantastic speeds") who envelope the stations in thick fog and cause them to be transported to Mars. More Diafanoids possess other space-personnel -- and naturally they want to possess "perfect specimen" Connie. DuBois voices the Diafanoids' demands -- which include having the still mysteriously unpossessed Halsted, Jake, Ken, and General Maitland fly all the possessed and pre-possessed to a nuclear fuel-station on Mars. Halsted is initially worried ("Soon our names will all be up in LIGHTS -- millions and millions of LIGHTS."), but he and Jake and the others take time out to unwind in a holding-area in the station which houses a food-dispenser which serves gourmet-meals and "Martian nectar". But they soon loose their appetites when they find the vast refuse bin at the bottom of their garbage-chute is full of the bodies of hundreds of space-station personnel who were deemed unacceptable. Well, any old how, Halsted rescues Connie and Charles, they breach the fuel-station's wall, and run back to their rocket (did you know Mars has Earth-type gravity, and that you can actually survive in its atmosphere for a few minutes, although it makes you choke?). Well, they fly off, and along comes a space-fleet led by none other than Halsted's dear old General of a dad -- and they blast the Martian station and all those nasty Diafanoids which were just beginning to escape. And in gratitude for saving her, Connie slaps Halsted on the face, haughtily saying it's for "The Good of the Whole". Ain't future love just grand?